(Originally published to Glitchwave on 2/28/2021)
[Image from igdb.com]
Dark Souls II
Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360
Release Date: March 11, 2014
As soon as Dark Souls 1 caught wind and won everyone's hearts, the series went through a peculiar marketing campaign focused on the tough difficulty. The remastered PC version of the first game is called the "Prepare to Die edition," overtly spelling out what they are trying to highlight. However, the first Dark Souls isn't just a torturous endeavor only for the type of gamer that unironically blends a cocktail of Mountain Dew and Doritos. It's a captivating experience filled to the brim with atmosphere, spectacle, and unique organic gameplay that greatly rewards the player once they overcome it. Miyazaki's vision for Dark Souls was uncompromising, but it was much more gratifying. During the development of Dark Souls II, Miyazaki was busy working on Bloodborne. The only involvement he had was overseeing it. Dark Souls II was made by a FromSoft B team or a FromSoft F team considering the quality of the game (F as in failing grade if that wasn't clear).
Dark Souls II was the last of the trilogy that I played, so I figured I'd play it to round out the whole trilogy. I already knew that this game had a "black sheep" type of reputation, but I assumed that I wouldn't mind considering that it was still a game in a franchise I adored. I just lowered my expectations for this game. As it turns out, I do not like Dark Souls II. I do not even remotely like Dark Souls II. I thought my experience with the first game tested my limits, but this was on a whole other level. At least my experience with the first Dark Souls turned out to be something that strongly resonated with me. Dark Souls II beat me to a pulp and hung me out to dry. It's a game that feels, in essence, like the first Dark Souls but doesn't have ANY of the aspects that I love about Dark Souls.
I'm going to support my point of this with the most pretentious thing ever written on this website: Dark Souls 1 is a work of art while Dark Souls II is just a video game. I may have struggled with the first Dark Souls, but it immediately became one of my favorite games because it offered so much more than just a challenge. The world Miyazaki created blew me away with its design, and the overall journey was weighted with a bevy of emotions. The spectacle was like nothing I had experienced in a video game. Dark Souls II, on the other hand, is just a difficult video game. In fact, being a difficult video game is all that Dark Souls II sets out to be. It doesn't have the atmosphere, the spectacle, the density, or the meticulous world-building of the first game. This game was made by people who totally missed the point of Dark Souls, and it totally shows in what they created. It's Dark Souls, but through an absolutely underwhelming, shallow, and tedious presentation.
Drangleic is the tragic kingdom setting in Dark Souls II. Like Lordran, the flame keeping everything peachy is dwindling and everything in Drangleic is suffering as a result. You, the "chosen undead" have to journey through the world of Drangleic collecting the souls of four main figures to gain access to the big cheese at the end of it. I think it's both funny and ironic that the heavily criticized second half of the first Dark Souls is, in essence, the entire base of the second game. You venture too far off corners of the map going through about three or four different levels before encountering the boss and hit a dead end. This method of progression seemed underwhelming in the first game, but that was only comparable to the first half. What was deemed as being lazily rushed is now the basis of the entire sequel. How interesting. You also can't choose which order you tackle the Lordsouls in like in the first game. I used to wonder why that is considering each direction isn't necessarily more difficult than the next, but I soon figured that it was because it would take clever world design to make the game seem open-world like the first one. This obviously wasn't the case for this game.
Majula is not as cozy as the Firelink Shrine, but I actually quite like it. It is off of a cliff-side near an ocean and it always looks like the sun is setting. The cloaked figure of the Emerald Herald perched on the cliff always looking off at the large body of water is quite beautiful that it could be the basis of a painting. It definitely helps that the score for this particular place is beautiful as well. It's too bad that every area that stems off from it is utter horseshit. Heide's Tower of Flame looks like a graphically upscaled beta area from the 1993 game Myst. The Gutter is essentially an uninspired Blighttown. Even an area as seemingly vast as the Iron Keep is a linear endurance test to get to the boss. The clever individual design of something like Sen's Fortress or labyrinthine like The Depths is never present in Dark Souls II.
Drangelic is also so geographically inconsistent they might as well have implemented a level select feature. Each level stems from a passageway from the hub world until you defeat one of the main lord bosses. Once you beat one, you go back to the hub world and uncover another path. It's hard to say if each passageway has a theme or not. The first one takes you to a forest that isn't even close to Things Betwixt, the dark forest tutorial area. This leads you to a series of ancient-looking architectural buildings that stand in water. This leads to a pitch-black wharf and an array of castles built near the wharf. Overall, it's a tad askew in terms of consistency, but it gets much worse. Every direction you go seems to lead you to another forest area. Huntsman's Copse is a rocky area with a waterfall and Shaded Woods is dehydrated and filled with spirits, attempting to make the level seem moody and ominous. I don't buy that the hub world of Majula is surrounded by different wooded areas because each of these areas is accessed in totally different directions. Are wooded areas considered more domestic and less hostile to ease the player for something like Iron Keep or The Black Gulch? I suppose that's what the developers were thinking because that is how the progression is for every section of this game. The progression never feels gratifying because the geography of the level never makes any sense. In the first game, the descent from Lower Undead Burg to the Demon Ruins is so earned because it feels like you are descending into hell. As you descend further, the environment gets darker, danker, and more hostile. Dark Souls II never captures this spectacle even when the game has you descend a well in Majula taking you to the darker territory as you progress.
The problem is that each area is too short. None of the areas can amount to something like Anor Londo because each level is just a passageway to get to the next one. None of the areas take any time to breathe because they all amount to a race to get to the next one. Each of them may have a single gimmick to them and that is about it. It is emblematic of the overall predicament with Dark Souls II and that is the developers went for quantity over quality. There are about 40 different individual areas in the game and just as many bosses. Quantity over quality was apparently their imperative when they were designing the range of difficulty as well. Dark Souls II was the hardest Souls game for me, but it wasn't because of something like clever like unconventional design. The philosophy that the FromSoft "F team" had was to overwhelm the player with ridiculous amounts of enemies at every corner. There were moments in the first game that did this, but enemy hoards were always made up of weak enemies that could be defeated easily as individuals. Everything balanced itself out. The "F team" of Dark Souls II probably has an onset carpal tunnel from mashing the copy and paste keys for every level. If there is a bigger enemy in a level, just know that there will be an army of him around the corner if not huddled up beside him like a football team ready to make a play. In this context, the play is to run at you with everything they have. Because of this, you cannot run away from anything in this game. I'm going to lose the respect of some Dark Souls players when I say this, but running away from enemies is a legitimate method of getting through some of the levels in these games. It's arguably as challenging as fighting them because the enemies in these games tend to be relentless, but Dark Souls II takes this to another level. You cannot get away from the hoards of enemies in most of the levels. If you try this in No-Man's Wharf, Iron Keep, Drangleic Castle, etc. over 25 different enemies will be on your tail like an angry mob. You might argue that this keeps the player from chickening out, but fighting them head-on is always overwhelming because all of the enemies come in packs no matter how individually strong or weak they are. You can't enter the fog door to get to a boss without being trounced by hoards of enemies. In every other Souls game, encountering a fog door meant you were invulnerable, but Dark souls II decides to fuck the player. This makes the runs to get to a boss from a bonfire one of the most frustrating and tedious parts of this game.
This philosophy of overwhelming the player with absurd quantities was also implemented with the bosses in this game. There are a whopping 35+ bosses in this game, but that's not what I mean by absurd numbers. To artificially pad the difficulty, half of the bosses in this game are gank bosses. I don't mind gank bosses, in fact, Ornstein and Smough are my favorite boss from Dark Souls 1 because both of them balance each other out wonderfully. There is no balance with the gank bosses in Dark Souls II. Every gank boss in this game feels like Gravelord Nito or the Four Kings, but if each skeleton had its own stake in the total health bar and if every king appeared at once. The latter example comes with bosses like the Ruin Sentinels, the Belfry Gargoyles (which is exactly like the Bell Gargoyles from the first game except cheap and obviously derivative), and the Throne Watcher/Throne Defender. The former example comes with bosses like Freja, Looking Glass Knight, and the Twin Dragonriders (this boss is even a cloned gank boss from a solo fight earlier in the game. Is it even remotely surprising that the "F Team" would rehash bosses to pad the game?). I can't even say if I have a favorite boss in this game. I guess an honorable mention goes to the Covetous Demon because he's laughably pathetic (and I always wanted to take a whack at Jabba the Hutt). However, I can easily tell you what my least favorite boss in this game is and it's the Royal Rat Authority. It's another gank boss that takes "inspiration" from both the Capra Demon and Sif fights from the first game. The main focus of the fight is a giant dog that fights almost exactly like Sif sans the giant sword. The point of frustration is that four small rats will ambush you AND poison you before the dog even shows up. Why did they do this? Because fuck you, that's why. The specific reason as to why this is my least favorite boss is because, for the first time in any Souls game, it forced me to use magic. I am strictly a melee fighter and I've gotten through the other games just fine without using any magic. With the Royal Rat Authority, I saw no other option. It really compromised the accessibility of using a specific build that works for you which was an aspect I loved about the original Dark Souls. Come to think of it, comparing this fight to Sif really puts things in perspective. Sif is a gorgeous, mighty grey wolf that makes you feel terrible for having to kill it. The Royal Rat Authority is an ugly, gangly dog that you want to put down immediately and then taxidermy his mangy ass out of spite. It's almost like a comparative synecdoche between the quality of both of these games. Bosses like these made me do something I didn't do for the other games: skip optional bosses. I just didn't have the drive to care.
What does the game do to aid you in combating their poorly implemented difficulty tactics? Nothing. In fact, if you can't acclimate yourself to it, the game punishes you. Every time you die in this game, your maximum health decreases incrementally until it gets to 50% of your overall health. Are you fucking kidding me, FromSoft? Sorry, I know that this is still the "F team" here, but who in their right mind would think that this was a good idea? The game is already hard enough without giving you penalties for dying. I don't expect the game to aid you for failure, but this is like failing to run a mile in a minute and cutting off a piece of your leg as punishment. It's a whole other level of unfairness. You can alleviate this affliction by consuming a human effigy, but there are only so many of them per area. It certainly doesn't help that the game only starts you off with one estus flask. Why not just make me fight with my bare hands while you're at it? There are these weird life gems that replenish your health very slowly but again, these items are finite. What was wrong with the estus system in the first game? Was it too fair to have the flasks come in multiples of five? If it isn't broken, then don't fix it. Then again, every single aspect of this game is broken, so I guess the estus system had to follow suit.
You could attest to the negativity of this review on the basis that I just suck at Dark Souls. You could be on to something, but I'd still have to disagree. The unfair difficulty isn't the only detractor and I don't think hard difficulty should be one unless it's cheaply implemented and there is no other payoff. Dark Souls is guilty of this in spades, but you wanna know something? There is an easy way to get around this game that I'm not sure if the developers intentionally implemented or this is just a result of their overall carelessness. Magic-users can dominate this game. In the first game, your magic was finite and you had to use it sparingly. In Dark Souls II, all cards are off the table and you can spam almost any spell you want to your heart's content. This is the ideal way to play Dark Souls II as any enemy swarm can be dealt with from a distance. As a result, it makes the difficulty of this game almost trivial. The difference between my melee play-style and magic users is like night and day in Dark Souls II. I shouldn't have to switch my playstyle to breeze through this game. It's so balanced in the other games, so what happened here? Bullshit. Bullshit happened here.
I walked away from the first Dark Souls feeling accomplished and in awe of what I experienced. I walked away from its sequel feeling like I got gang-banged. It just shows me that Dark Souls needs the Miyazaki vision to successfully make a game that is both challenging and substantial. Otherwise, a shallow, boring, and frustrating game is made. This is the Family Guy to Dark Souls 1's Simpsons. Some elements are reminiscent of a quality product, but it fails to understand what makes the other one so meaningful. This game was like the equivalent of performing a pledge for a fraternity where you have to walk ten blocks across town with a pineapple shoved up your ass and you have to do it naked in broad daylight without falling over. Just as you've almost made it, a frat bro kicks you in the balls and you fall over, as a result, making you do the whole thing again, but with a pineapple shoved in your mouth as well. It's just enough to make you drop out of school and become a plumber or something. Dark Souls II is by far my least favorite Souls game and was one of the most unpleasant gaming experiences I've ever had.
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And if you think I'm playing the DLC, you've got another thing coming.
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